Fiction review: 'Room' by Emma Donoghue

After being abducted at age 19, an anonymous woman is held captive in a 120-square-foot, soundproof shelter for seven years. Her captor visits, bringing groceries, removing trash and forcing himself on her. Jack, her son, has just turned 5; the room is all he knows. Narrated by this 5-year-old who's never ventured outdoors, "Room" is his account of the pair's captivity and the aftermath of their escape.

"Room" is being touted as Emma Donoghue's breakout novel -- the 40-year-old writer's seventh -- and was recently named a finalist for the Man Booker prize.

Donoghue's self-contained universe is impressively thorough, and the narrator's naivete is realistically heartbreaking. Mom, whose name we never learn, claims that everything on TV is false to placate her son. He names everything inside, like Meltedy Spoon and Toothbrush. Their structured days include PE classes.

The repetition of their world is maddening, and after a while the reader realizes that while a child might be kept entertained, any adult socially isolated in such a small world would become insane. Once outside, Jack ponders how "in the world there's so much, persons don't even know the names" of everything they see. The trauma and aftermath that Mom and Jack describe don't seem to mesh with the extent of their isolation.

The author was inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, in which an Austrian man locked his daughter in a basement for 24 years, and no doubt gleaned many details -- the lack of sunlight, the newfound difficulty with depth perception and spaces. But Donoghue seems to want it both ways: a realistic imprisonment that skimps on emotional turmoil.

"Room" has real stylistic moxie, and Donoghue's to be praised for the strength of the narrative. But telling the story from a kid's point of view feels like an easy trick to point out complexities or standards of modern life. Absent are any of the emotional subtleties, insights or genuine trauma that would actually happen in such an ordeal. But read as a love story between mother and son, the book is a triumph, a celebration of the lengths we go to for our loved ones, and the comfort in the skewed world that relationships create.